President Obama Revives "Leave It To Beaver's" Eddie Haskell For the Sequester Debate

Paul Roderick Gregory
, ContributorI cover domestic and world economics from a free-market perspective.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Eddie Haskell was the real star of the 50s classic TV series “Leave It to Beaver.” Eddie constantly stirred up trouble, blamed the hapless Beave and Wally when things went wrong, but whose misdeeds were found out in the end by Ward and June Cleaver. That was a different day and age, but the Eddie Haskells are still with us, and they are in very high places.

Barack Obama is our first “Eddie Haskell President.” He stirs up mischief, for which he blames the rascally Republicans, while professing his own innocence or non-involvement. He levitates above the fray while his operatives do the dirty work. He offers grand bargains, then moves the goal posts, and blames his jilted adversaries for obstructionism. He extracts costly concessions and then berates the conceders for not giving enough. He promises a post-racial society but conducts a campaign of class warfare. Wall Street bonuses and Cayman accounts disqualify opponents but are “not important” for his own nominees.

Our media is supposed to play the sensible Ward and June Cleaver in exposing such antics, but it acts instead as Eddie’s accomplices and enablers. Where are Ward and June when we really need them?

Bob Woodward’s Obama’s sequester deal-changer reveals an Eddie-Haskell aka President Obama at the top of his game as he a) proposes the sequester, b) blocks corrective legislation, c) wipes away his fingerprints, and d) berates the Republicans for their “meat cleaver” bill that will ruin the economy and wreak chaos on the lives of millions.

Few would have even heard of these four points until Bob Woodward, in the “game changing” role of Ward Cleaver, made the startling revelation that Obama’s White House conjured up the very sequester that he now professes to deplore:

“The automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of (Jack) Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors ....Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011.”

Woodward is not alone in this conclusion. Democrat Finance Committee chairman, Max Baucus, also let the cat out of the bag in an interview with a CBS affiliate:

"The President’s part of the sequester – the White House recommended it, frankly, back in August 2011, so now we’re feeling the effects of it. Now I don’t want to say the President is solely to blame – he’s not – it’s both the President and Congress."

If still unconvinced about the sequester’s origins, note that White House press secretary Jay Carney reluctantly fessed up to an indifferent press crops (as the President railed a few block away against the “Republican sequester” flanked by first responders) that:

“The sequester was something that was discussed… and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

Surprise! The White House press corps did not make a mad dash to be the first to file a sensational headline: “The President denounces his own sequester.” Instead, they shrugged and returned to describing a valiant Obama fighting to save ordinary Americans from destructive Republican policy.

Why would an American President put forward a package of spending cuts designed to inflict maximum damage? Why would the newly-reelected Obama warn Republicans that he would not tolerate any attempts to make the sequester less painful and less “stupid,” to use the words of a former CBO director. As Obama warned:

“To those who want to undo the painful automatic spending cuts, my message is simple. No! I will veto any efforts to get rid of the cuts to military and domestic spending. There will be no easy off ramps for this one.” (See You Tube).

True to his word, Obama’s minions declared two Republican House bills, written to correct the worst abuses of the sequester, DOA.

Eddie Haskell would have marveled at Obama’s sequester gambit in shock and awe. It kills so many birds with one stone.

For Obama, government is too small. Spending cuts were out of question, but he had to offer them to extract the $600 billion tax increase from reluctant Republicans, many pledged to no tax increases. By cooking up “painful” automatic cuts bereft of flexibility to ameliorate the pain, Obama calculated he could dupe Republicans into leaving the cuts on the table, while he walked away with his tax increases. As he promised in the October 22 presidential debate, the sequester “will not happen.” The Republicans will surely cave, and he would again humiliate the gullible Beave-and-Wally Republicans.

After proposing the sequester, making it an integral part of the fiscal cliff deal, and protecting it from legislation to improve it, Eddie-Haskell Obama now needed to wipe his fingerprints from the deal.

In the third presidential debate, Obama emphatically denied parentage: “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” ( I guess he forgot Woodward was nosing around the White House to prove him wrong). None other than accomplice Jack Lew confirmed the President’s account two days later, claiming it was the Republicans who insisted on a sequester. It was not until his February 13 confirmation hearing that Lew conceded that the White House originated the sequester plan.

“The White House had made significant miscalculations in the spending fight. Democrats (read Obama) believed that Republican reluctance to allow deep cuts to the Pentagon would lead them to back off the automatic cuts, known as the sequester.” Well, even the best of us make mistakes some of the time.

In the last two days, Obama’s chief media enabler, the New York Times, has devoted intense coverage to the sequester – describing in gory detail the havoc it will wreak on air traffic control, state budgets, the military, food inspection, hungry children, and just about everything else. Cabinet officers are paraded before the press to elaborate the calamities that lay ahead.

The Times fails to mention that these small budget cuts simply slow the growth of government, which will actually grow by $100 billion over the decade.

Nowhere in its the more than 7,000 words devoted to the sequester does the Times admit that the President is railing against his own sequester, that he threatened to veto any Republican efforts to make it less “stupid,” and that his White House deliberately designed the sequester to wreak as much damage as possible. It was not until the Times’s Sunday edition that it was forced to mention Woodward’s findings. Woodward is simply too big a gun to ignore.

Eddie Haskell would be proud of Barack Obama’s sequester antics. Depressing is the fact that the New York Times depicts the sequester as a battle over political advantage, reveling that Obama’s advisors “point to recent polls that show he holds an upper hand in the budget debate.”(See For Obama and Team, Calm, Not Crisis, in Latest Fiscal Battle).

Should it not be a battle to help the people and our stalled economy? Should that not that be the uppermost concern of the American President?